East Bay Kerry

The robots are coming to get you.

The robots are coming to get you.

Right here in America. At the movies, when robots go rogue, the moral is often Shelley’s Frankenstein. You deserve the mayhem for screwing with the natural order, infringing on God’s turf, or just because you’re playing with fire.

Part two is always the heroes getting us out of trouble. When robots attack, it’s fine to smash ‘em up. It’s not as if humans are attacking, it’s just some gadget run amuck.

Ever notice how handy it is to squish human groups into that machine category? That intellectual shortcut lets you name your fear, like Zionist Jews or Terrorists or Communist. The film I, Robot (2004) animates that visceral fear of The Other, a horde of likeable humanoids with the potential to snap into murderous monsters. This despite the hard-wiring of selfless ethics. The retro Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) also sports a legion of mad robots bent on destruction.

So that’s the external threat, hordes of faceless enemies. Al Qaeda, if you will.

Fear personified

But what happens when you’re the robot? When someone programs you? How do you know you’ve been programmed? What’s your relationship with your maker? How much free will do you really have? Can you figure out when and how to exercise it? The Manchurian Candidate (1962) had Red China programming people and this year’s edition, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), has a corporation at the controls. Their chilling argument is that with sufficient technology, anyone can be made to think and do anything, even murder, without awareness of the programming. In the Stepford Wives (2004) carefully managed robots take over for imperfect spouses; but their mind controls seems nearly as effective. In Spider-Man 2, self-aware prosthetics twist a scientist's mind, and I, Robot's Officer Spooner feels identifies with robots because of his own bionics.

So when you’re the robot, you’ve an identity crisis, insecurity, and confusion.

And Fear.

I mentioned fighting back. These stories rarely end with the robots taking over. Expect ordinary people to take up pitchforks and baseball bats to fight back. To assert primacy. Because in action we leave victimhood behind, we switch gears from introspection and conversation to targets and methods. From prey to hunter. From rest to adrenaline.

9/11 cast a pall of victimization on a proud America. We tried to make sense of things. Then we got in gear. We rushed new laws without reading them, reshuffled the Executive Branch, toppled the Taliban, and sacked Saddam. But things aren’t right, aren’t working. Our children and neighbors still come home in body bags. We’re imposing a birth tax to pay for this year’s economy. We don’t feel safer, richer, or in command of our fate. And, as in the robot movies, we are afraid of ourselves and of the world.

I think that’s why Dean and Kerry and Edwards have had such appeal. Why so many are “becoming political” for the first time. Why 3000 people are mobilized in the East Bay a whole four months before the election, in a place where just four years’ ago we were lucky to get 300 volunteers on election day.

We crave leadership that helps us believe there’s a trustworthy path. We demand leadership that comes not from fear but from hope and from opportunity. We need leaders with a strategy for keeping the “robots” friendly or bringing them around. And for helping us find our confidence and trust ourselves. Trust that we know what we’re doing and that we are in charge.

Are you feeling that way now? I’m not, but I’m working on it.

I spent a week in Vienna, Austria, this month. It’s a gorgeous place with wonderful people. But the grandparents of folks living there built concentration camps an hour outside of town. I’m sure they were nice people before it seemed like a good idea to kill all the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. But somehow their programming got screwed up, messed with, and they surrendered themselves to the machine.

Could it happen in America? Ashcroft trading solid freedoms for marginal safety. Ridge calibrating our adrenaline levels with colored flags and vague threats. Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz beating the drums for war, spinning tragedy as accomplishment. Secrecy trumping transparency. Personal loyalty to the President above all.

They are all nice folks, good people, patriots all.

But we feel it happening here.

And it makes our skin crawl.

So we’re mobilizing. We’re raising money. We’re blowing off a night of T.V. for meetups and phone banks and letter writing. And we’re casting ourselves as Will Smith turning back the robot tide, as Denzel or Sinatra throwing off the mind control.

It’s a subtle thing, tyranny.

Beating it starts with shedding fear. Willing ourselves to free our minds and our hearts. Helping others do the same.

Then, working together, to earn the leadership we need, that we deserve. John Kerry. John Edwards.

Welcome to East Bay Kerry. You are not alone.

Shocking GOP Hispanic Outreach

This is kind of fun in a surreal, vaguely racist kind of way:

Everyone talks about how crucial the Latino vote is going to be in November. Both parties are putting out literature and Web pages in Spanish in an effort to communicate better with this huge constituency.

The Republicans have a sign-up page -- called "Abriendo Caminos" or opening paths -- that promises Spanish-speaking folks that President Bush and the GOP will "send you weekly news about the topics that most interest you."

The sign-up page asks the usual stuff -- name, address, telephone number and e-mail address. You are to check which of many listed topics -- immigration, health, Social Security, corporate responsibility, crime prevention and so on -- are of most interest.

Then it asks what you are. There are four options: war veteran or retired military; teacher or educator; senior citizen; or farmer or rancher. That's it. Nothing for lawyers, doctors, engineers or corporate executives to check.

Not even a box for "otro?"

Look for yourself.

Historians vs. George W. Bush

Of 415 historians surveyed, 81% classified the Bush Presidency as a failure.

From Texas to Iraq, Bush's jails are all same

On a recent trip to St. Louis, an article caught my eye in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (May 15th issue) regarding parallel prisoner abuses in a Texas correctional facility (in 96') and the widely publicized abuses in Abu Graib. The article was written by Jon Sawyer, Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief.

If Bush denies, stalls, and ignores problems until TV shines a light on serious tragedies in prisons, if he shuns responsibility and plays blame games, how can we trust him with all of government? How can we trust him to wage a war on terror and be straight with the American people? Hiding your problems is a sign of insecurity, of moral weakness. We need strong leadership, moral leadership, experienced leadership.

Here's the story.

(Headline) "Prisoner abuse in Texas, Iraq bear similarities" - Texas case involved a video showing Missouri prisoners stripped and bitten by dogs.

WASHINGTON - Prisoners stripped naked, beaten about the head, set upon by dogs and kicked by verbally abusive guards.

George W. Bush, informed of the alleged mistreatment, says nothing publicly because the incident is the subject of internal investigation - only to have shocking images, taken by the guards themselves, flash around the world.

The incident took place in Texas nearly a decade ago, in 1996, when Bush was that state's governor. The prisoners abused were Missourians, inmates temporarily transferred to county jail facilities in Texas run by private contractors because of overcrowded prisons back home.

In the 1996 case, Bush had no direct responsibility. The state-appointed Commission on Jail Standards could review local operations and make recommendations but had no supervisory control.

The parallels are striking, all the same - both the nature of the abuses and the way they surfaced.

Denise Lieberman, then and now legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri, said that "the main similarity is that no one took it seriously until the tapes showed up" - in the Texas case, a training videotape made by guards at the Brazoria County jail; in Iraq, digital camera shots taken by Army reservists on duty at the Abu Ghraib prison.

In the 32-minute videotape from Texas, recorded in September 1996, black-uniformed guards storm a group of card-playing inmates. The inmates are strip-searched and forced to crawl naked down a hall. Several are jolted with an electric prod; at least three are bitten by snarling dogs.

When the Post-Dispatch and other media outlets obtained copies of the videotape 11 months later, the response was dramatic. Missouri officials immediately canceled the Texas contract and brought 415 inmates home. Federal charges of civil rights violations were brought against four of the guards: One pleaded guilty, another was convicted and two were acquitted.

A class-action suit on behalf of the inmates was settled in 1999, with Brazoria County and the private contractor (Capital Correctional Resources Inc.) agreeing to pay $2.2 million.

In the Texas case, as in the current incident in Iraq, Bush was informed of the alleged abuses early on but at first said nothing publicly. In Texas, the complaints to the governor's office came from a number of sources: inmates, a critical audit by the Missouri Department of Corrections and letters forwarded by then Missouri Rep. Charles Quincy Troupe, D-St. Louis. The complaints were forwarded to the jail standards commission for review but it was only after airing of the videotape that Bush commented publicly, saying that he found the behavior of guards appalling.

The Rev. Larry Rice, director of the New Life Evangelistic Center, traveled to Texas after release of the videotapes and met with Bush's aides on behalf of the Missouri inmates. He said Friday he saw "tremendous parallels" between then and events at Abu Ghraib.

Fed Up

Amazing how Republicans are beginning to turn on Bush. This article in The Washington Post details the rather desparate need for more $ in Iraq. My favorite part though:

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, charged that the president is playing political games by postponing further funding requests until after the election, to try to avoid reopening debate on the war's cost and future.

Weldon described the administration's current defense budget request as "outrageous" and "immoral" and said that at least $10 billion is needed for Iraqi operations over the next five months.

"There needs to be a supplemental, whether it's a presidential election year or not," he said. "The support of our troops has to be the number one priority of this country. . . . Somebody's got to get serious about this."

And Bush has the audacity to run ads questioning Sen. Kerry's commitment to the troops? Shame on you, sir.

Bush and the NRA

The assault weapons ban is up for renewal. Pres. Bush is addressing the NRA tomorrow.

Does that make you happy, or not, not, not, ?

What did you think of Bush on his feet?

Dave Winer of Scripting News reacts to the President's news conference:

Queso: "It's about time Americans understand who it was that they elected." Amen to that. Tonight's press conference was pretty bad. At one point I thought maybe Bush should just resign and go be President of Iraq. He seems to have lost track of his job, which is President of the country I live in, the country I just paid taxes to, the country whose young people are dying to save a country that did not attack us on Sept 11 and one that clearly does not want our help. Watching him fumble tonight, I realized this is Mr Joe Average thrust into a situation way over his head, as if that wasn't bad enough, he started a war that has no end. Shame on the Republicans for nominating this guy in 2000. He can't complete a sentence. He talked about a chicken farm in Libya (twice!). The Republicans still have the power to fix it, get a new candidate for the November election, and start the withdrawal from Iraq now. It's a disaster. This guy is drowning, and that's bad.

White House Economic News

The White House conceded today that out of the 300,000 people who found new jobs last month, 299,998 of them were involved in the production of negative campaign ads for the President and the other two were hired to slash Richard Clarke's tires. Source: The Borowitz Report via B.L. Ochman.

Republicans for Kerry -- Part 3

God, sometimes I love John McCain...

From The Boston Herald:

Maverick McCain rips GOP
By Noelle Straub
Friday, April 2, 2004

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain yesterday unleashed an attack on his own party, saying the GOP is ``astray'' on key issues and criticizing President Bush [related, bio] on the war in Iraq.

``I believe my party has gone astray,'' McCain said, criticizing GOP stands on environmental and minority issues.

``I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy,'' he said. ``But I also feel the Republican Party can be brought back to the principles I articulated before.''

The maverick senator made the remarks at a legislative seminar hosted by U.S. Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Lowell) as he again ruled out running on a ticket with Democrat John F. Kerry [related, bio].

The Arizona Republican took on President Bush for failing to prepare Americans for a long involvement in Iraq, saying, ``You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that.''

McCain said the U.S. should seek more U.N. involvement in Iraq. ``Many people in this room question, legitimately, whether we should have gone in or not,'' he said, adding that that debate ``will be part of this presidential campaign.''

My favorite part? He's even using Kerry's talking points. Compare:

``You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that.''

with

"George Bush thought he could play dress-up on an aircraft carrier in front of a sign saying “Mission Accomplished” and we wouldn’t notice that our troops are dying in Iraq every day. That Americans on the farm and in our factories are hurting and struggling every day. That George Bush has lost two jobs every minute and run up the deficit a billion dollars every day. But we did notice. We reject the cynicism and radically wrong direction of this Administration. And we’re here to say that tonight marks the beginning of the end of the Bush Presidency."

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2003_1115.html

Democratic Game Plan?

From The Economist, via DailyKos: